Does Non-Farm Income Increase Farm-Household Income Inequality? Evidence from Three Continents

This paper performs inequality decomposition by income sources using data from three different continents, using a unified inequality decomposition approach. Household survey data from Ethiopia, Georgia and Korea are used for this purpose, and the uniform result is that non-farm labor income is an equalizing source of income, in the sense that increasing non-farm labor income by 1% uniformly results in a lower Gini index of inequality. These results shed light on the processes that affect farm-household inequality under various geographical, economic and institutional conditions, and imply that policy directed towards non-farm income sources could not only raise rural incomes on average but also potentially reduce inequality, i.e., be pro-poor.